The head of an international ‘monastery without walls’, says all religions share a mystic tradition. At his London base, he tells how meditation can benefit everyone from children to business people

I’d agreed a date to meet the Anglo-Irish mystic Laurence Freeman. But where, I wondered, would a Benedictine monk have lunch? “How about the community?” Freeman suggested, mentioning the house in Kensington that is his London base. “We can meditate first, and then join the others at table. I only ask that you make a contribution.”

Like Ramadan, the Christian season of Lent offers the practitioners of their faith an opportunity with many graces, to interiorize their experience of the mysteries. We do this by purifying and simplifying our minds as well as our ordinary lives. It is a time to accept that the spiritual is less an ideal than the real. It is about healing and wholeness rather than a perfectionism which dangerously feeds rather than diminishes the ego. About moderation rather than extremes.

It can be a stimulus and refreshment to take on new spiritual disciplines. It can also be a risk. Are they taken on as techniques that we can master to cajole or even force God to reward us? Are they ways of reprimanding ourselves for our weaknesses in a ways that secretly makes us more proud rather than leading to the humility that is self-knowledge?

Father Evdokinov has written: “God created the angels in silence, so our fathers tell us. God guides those who are silent, whereas those who are restless cause the angels to laugh”.

I believe that the angels laugh at this world of ours, so full of restlessness, at all our meetings with their overflow of words, at our talk that cannot create relationship.

I think the angels also laugh at us, dedicated Christians though we are, who should remember Psalm 127: “Except the Lord build the house,/ They labour in vain that build it./ Except the Lord keep the city,/ The watchman wakes in vain./ It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late,/ To eat the bread of sorrows:/ For so he gives his beloved sleep”. I think the angels laugh at us, who know this psalm and repeat it frequently in our prayers, but who are breathless with anxiety and worry about too many things, even in our pastoral work.

I must congratulate Father Laurence, whose book will continue to help men and women – both religious and ordinary church-goers, as well as those still searching for an answer – to enter into Christian meditation and the experience of silence. Christian meditation makes all the difference!

Interview with Laurence Freeman for Svjetlo Rijeci (Light of the Word, Sarajevo)

Fr. Ivo introduces Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB, Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation (www.wcm.org) and presents the booklet “Christian Meditation: Your Daily Practice” and the reasons for his being invited to Bosnia.

1. Fr. Laurence, you have chosen spirituality to be your vocation, your life. What actually is ‘spirituality’?

Dom Laurence Freeman OSB is a monk of the Olivetan Benedictine Congregation of Monte Oliveto Maggiore and Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation. Fr Laurence was born in England in 1951 where he was educated by the Benedictines and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

Before entering monastic life he had experience with the United Nations, banking and journalism. In the monastery his spiritual teacher was John Main with whom he studied and whom he helped in the establishment of the first Christian Meditation Centre in London.